Still Life with Father and Degenerating Motor Neurons
by Meghan Sterling
My father talks to me in my sleep, his words reduced to syllables
split by his heavy tongue, like a red sea cleaving down the middle
at Moses’s feet, a perfect part, the line of scalp a shining light
between waves of hair. My father’s words like the dragging of a boot
in dirt, he does not say wish or need or love or why this and why me,
he mouths it in his gasps for air, he pantomimes, his arms grasping
the metal walker, his body behind moving metal as if caged. My father
doesn’t believe any new stories, like the one about my Grandmother
being stabbed on a rooftop. Instead he wags his striated tongue,
arching his eyebrows like a tv detective. What is happening to his body
isn’t true, either, he won’t believe that he can’t force his body, push his body
back to pliancy, back to the strength he had when he was kayaking
the coast of Alaska, glaciers at the stern, glaciers at the bow, the years
stretched out and yielding their ground like the Yukon, bright as the pink
fireweed singeing the tops of Denali. The water would part at the nose
of his boat as if he were traveling with God. My father only talks to me
when I’ve left, when he calls and I can’t get to the phone in time,
and the ringing cries out from across the sea of air its ragtime melody,
or when I run the bathtub for my daughter and the water parts
around a toy boat overturned beneath the faucet and I know
that my father will never arrive. My father doesn’t converse, he says
sssshhhhh with his filmy lips, he says lies with his bloated tongue.
He sits straight in his chair and greets us with his rigid shoulder bones
and I palm his bald skull, the closest we come to an embrace.
About the Author
Meghan Sterling’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Rust & Moth, The West Review, Colorado Review, Pacifica Literary Review, SWIMM, Sky Island Journal, Valparaiso Poetry Review, River Heron Review, Rattle and many others, and received 2 pushcart nominations in 2021. She is Associate Poetry Editor of The Maine Review, a Hewnoaks Artist Colony resident in 2019 and 2021, and her debut collection, These Few Seeds, came out in 2021 from Terrapin Books. She and her family live in Portland, Maine. Read her work at meghansterling.com.